


Intruder

by kimstaticchild



Category: The Borrowers - All Media Types, The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Borrowers - Freeform, Gen, Size Difference, Size Fic, TINY - Freeform, giant, size!fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-07 12:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6803737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimstaticchild/pseuds/kimstaticchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While out on a supply run, Daryl is forced to seek shelter from a storm. While settling into an abandoned cabin for the night, he comes across something that's a whole new level of weird--a tiny person who's been getting by just fine during the apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intruder

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a weird little drabble to mellow out some school stress, but it ended up being fun, so I kept going. c: I have a few tentative plans for a continuation, probably once school stress starts hitting again.

Wind whistled through the cracks and crevices of the wooden walls. Daryl stood at the threshold of the cabin, crossbow raised and ready to fire. He had never scavenged this far from the prison before, which meant there was a chance the place wasn’t cleaned out of supplies. He didn’t get his hopes up. It was more likely he’d find a walker than any food.

Even if there was nothing to be found in the cabin, it was stroke of luck that he’d happened upon any sort of shelter. The storm brewing overhead didn’t look like it’d be too forgiving to a motorcyclist on the open road.

The floorboards creaked as Daryl stepped inside. He held his breath and listened closely for any sounds that weren’t his--not an easy thing to do with the thunder beginning to rumble outside.

He almost didn’t catch the faint sound on the other side of the room, but there it was. A soft shuffling noise that only lasted for a heartbeat. Tensing, he glared in the direction of the sound, but he didn’t catch any movement. He shifted his crossbow to one hand and fished a small flashlight from the pocket of his leather vest. He waited for a hiss, a grunt, anything that would warn him a walker was about to shuffle toward him.

Nothing.

When he didn’t hear anything for a long minute, he proceeded deeper into the cabin and kept his flashlight tucked under one hand even as he held his crossbow at the ready.

The place wasn’t big by any means. With a large lake not far through the trees, Daryl had to guess it was a fishing cabin. Along with the main area, the other two rooms were barren; predictably, so were the pantries and cabinets. It would have been nice to have some reward for his find, but he could manage. Supplies were more valuable than food now that food was growing at the prison.

Unfortunately, the cabin was empty of supplies, too.

After giving the place another sweep and making sure the door was shut tightly, Daryl settled in the corner of the main room. For all his insisting that he preferred scavenging alone, he hated sleeping on a run and having no one to watch his back. He tried not to sleep at all, if he could help it, but he hadn’t anticipated a storm forcing him indoors. Chances were, he’d be heading back to the prison empty-handed.

A noise came from the other end of the room again. Shuffling, but distant. Maybe small. Nonetheless, Daryl had his hand on his crossbow as he swept the beam of the flashlight across the cabin. Once again, the noise stopped quickly, and there was nothing to be seen.

Unwilling to take any chances, he grunted and stood back up. _Something_ was in the cabin. He didn’t know what, but he wasn’t sitting down until he found out.

 _Probably a mouse_ , he thought. Unless it wasn’t. And that could mean the difference between life and death.

On his first sweep of the cabin, he had only been looking for signs of people--walkers too, of course, but they were the same size. Now, he kept an eye out for other signs. And he found some. Small paths in the dust led to gaps in the floorboards. He guided the beam of the flashlight along the base of the wall as well, finding similar paths.

Scoffing, he eased up and rolled his shoulders. “Getting worked up over a damn mouse,” he muttered. He slung his crossbow over his back and started for the corner again.

But something caught his eye before he made it. Something visible beneath the boards as the flashlight beam lazily danced across the floor. He paused and fell to a crouch, narrowing his eyes at the ground. Leaning down a little, he hesitated. After a wary glance at the room, he shifted to his hands and knees for a better look, but the gap in the floorboards was too small.

Daryl dug his fingers under one end of the floorboard and tried to pry it up. When he made little progress, he abandoned the idea of using his hands and grabbed his crossbow. Driving a corner of a metal limb between the wood, he made use of the leverage and finally popped the board out, splintering it in the middle.

Food.

There was _food_ stashed under the floorboards. He couldn’t even seen the extent of it from the limited view he’d gained from the one board. Bringing the flashlight closer to the ground, he also noticed an array of fishing hooks and lines. A mouse certainly couldn’t have done this, and whoever _had_ done it was long gone, judging by the run-down state of the cabin.

Which meant he wouldn’t feel bad about claiming the stash. Without a second thought, he grabbed what he could reach. The stash seemed to be composed entirely of small wrapped packages like granola bars, but he couldn’t complain. Food was food, and he wasn’t about to let it go to waste.

With the crinkling of the packages, he almost didn’t catch the sound that came from the side: a soft sound, like a sigh mixed with a groan.

Daryl went absolutely still. A person with less experience with self-preservation might have whipped in the direction of the noise immediately. As for him, he made himself keep doing what he was doing, plucking food from the widened opening in the floor. But out of the corner of his eye, he searched for movement.

It wasn’t long before he found it.

Something was making its way to the floor from the counter along the wall. It was so hidden in the shadows that Daryl wouldn’t have spotted it if it wasn’t for its strange, bright coloring. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get a good look at it without a risk of alerting it that it had been seen, but he couldn’t let it get away before he figured out what the hell was going on.

He stopped grabbing granola bars and steeled himself. From one second to the next, he lunged to his feet, abandoning his crossbow on the floor to make a surprise advance at the small thing climbing down the counter.

Halfway to his target, he aimed the beam of his flashlight at it. Skidding to a halt, he froze up, and so did it. _She_. Whatever the hell Daryl was looking at. She was dangling a few feet above the floor on some kind of thin rope, swaying slightly from the displacement of air from Daryl’s rush to the counter. Looking about as shocked as he was, she stared up at him with wide blue eyes.

Daryl snapped out of his stupor and took a slow step closer, face scrunched up in disbelief. She must have snapped out of it too because in a flash, she was sliding down the rope to reach the ground. 

Naturally, he rushed toward the counter with a plan to stop her. As he closed in, the tiny girl look up at him and lost her grip on the rope. One second she was fine, the next she was sailing downward. She screamed surprisingly loud for such a little thing. Daryl reacted immediately, lunging forward while throwing out his free hand to catch her. He fell to his knees in time to stop her fall. She landed on her back right in the middle of his palm, her scream cut short with a tiny puff of air.

Breathing deeply, he brought the flashlight over her, wondering if he had actually fallen asleep in the corner of the cabin and was having some kind of trippy dream. He had seen the stuff of nightmares. The dead walked the earth again. The things he’d seen before that weren’t so great either. But nothing, _nothing_ could prepare him for the sight of a tiny girl, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.

“No, nono, please,” her little voice floated up, thin and ready to shatter.

Daryl frowned, his shoulders rising and falling with deep breaths. He watched her move, too amazed to register what exactly she was doing. He still held her within reach of her rope, which she leaped up to grab. The sensation made his palm tickle. She threw him a terrified look and yanked the string, bringing the rest of it down to her. A glint of metal caught the flashlight beam--a fishing hook tied to the end of the string. 

She caught the hook with both hands. With a tiny grunt, she sprang away from Daryl’s curled fingers and drove the barb of the hook into the skin between his thumb and forefinger.

“Ow! Jesus!”

His flinch would have sent her flying right to the floor if he didn’t reflexively drop the flashlight and close his newly freed hand around his little attacker. In the faint light, he saw a line of blood dribble from the tiny wound on his hand, but it hardly held his attention compared to the onslaught of panic coming from his other hand.

“Put me down!” The tiny girl thrashed against his fingers, her head and shoulders free from his grasp. Her messy blonde ponytail swung around with her writhing. She twisted around, trying to find some leeway as Daryl picked his flashlight back up and brought her closer to his face. “

“Hey, calm down,” he said gruffly, a little peeved that she had stabbed him right after he saved her from falling.

“Let go!” she insisted. “The h-hook, it’s…”

Feeling the touch of metal trapped in his hand along with the girl, Daryl realized belatedly that he had caught the hook in his desperation to not drop her. He turned his hand over and opened it, keeping his fingers curled slightly in case she tried to run.

“Shit,” Daryl muttered, pinching the hook and taking it away before she could decide to stab him again. He stood up and left it on the counter with the string, far more interested in the blood running down the tiny girl’s arm. It looked like the hook had raked her pretty bad. It looked to be around the same amount of blood from the wound on his hand, but with her size, taking their comparative sizes into account, that cut had to hurt her like hell.

Fussing over her injury, she sat up on her knees with a whimper.

“What the hell _are_ you?” Daryl blurted before he could become lost in staring at her again.

“ _Bleeding,_ that’s what!” she snapped.

Daryl reeled back in shock at her boldness, and she tensed up in turn, looking at him with big eyes and a gaping mouth as if she couldn’t believe she’d yelled at him either.

“No. No, I’m sorry, I-I didn’t--” She stammered breathlessly, shifting to sit with her legs in front of her and scooting back until she ran into his fingers. “Please, put me down. Y-You can have my food if you want, just leave me alone! Please… Don’t hurt me.” She clutched her arm against herself, her little chest rising and falling with shallow breaths.

Daryl narrowed his eyes and glanced back at the floorboards and the food scattered on the floor. He couldn’t begin to imagine how long it had taken her to store all of that, but clearly it was before any strangers happened upon the place. Even he only found the stash by chance.

Daryl set the flashlight on the counter, never taking his eyes off the girl. He made sure the beam stayed pointed herway, which allowed him to catch a glint of tears creating tracks down her tiny cheeks. He wasn’t sure how to even begin consoling her. Hell, he was still in shock himself.

“We’ve already got some kinda disease changing us into walkers when we die,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. “Don’t tell me there’s something _shrinking_ people too.”

The blonde stared up at him, her pink lips slightly parted. “ _Shrinking_? No, I’ve… I’ve been like this my whole life! What’s a walker?--Ah, I don’t care! I just want you to put me down!” Still clutching her arm, she looked over the side of his hand, glancing at her hook and string mournfully.

“Hey, I need some answers first,” Daryl said, trying to get some sort of grasp on the impossible situation. His voice brought her eyes back to him, still filled with fear. He attempted to soften his voice. “Besides, you’ve got a pretty nasty cut there. Sorry about that. I mean, you shouldn’ta _stabbed_ me, but I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“W-wouldn’t have stabbed you if you hadn’t _grabbed_ me!”

He raised his eyebrows. “You mean save you from falling? Yeah, you’re welcome for that, by the way.”

She glared at him for a second, then looked down. She still looked scared, but there was something bitter and resigned on her face. “You would’ve grabbed me even if I hadn’t lost my grip--exactly like everyone used to say. Humans’ll grab us the first moment they get.”

Daryl frowned at the way she used the word _humans_. Maybe she really had been that size her whole life. Something about what she said made him feel guilty, but he pushed the feeling aside, perfectly justified in what he had done.

“You were sneaking around and watching me! Had to find out what you were. Still do.” He fixed her with a narrowed-eyed look, part of him wondering when he was going to wake up. “You’re definitely not a walker. How ‘bout you let me fix you up, and you tell me all about it. What you are, what you’re doing here.” He nodded back at the gaping hole in the floorboards. “How the hell a scrawny thing like you made a stash like that.”

“Why?” she snapped with sudden ferocity, leaning back against his fingers. Her long ponytail tickled against his skin. At first he thought she was finally settling down, but it turned out she was trying to push herself away from him--a hard thing to do while she was in his hand.

“Why what?”

“I… I already said you could have the food! What else d-do you want from me?”

Daryl leaned away from her a little. Seeing that blood run down her arm… He _needed_ to do something about it. Even if she had been spying on him, it looked like he had been the one to trespass on her turf. Now that he was holding her and knew just how fragile she was, he certainly wasn’t intimidated or wary of her, like he would be of other survivors he came across.

“You can keep the food,” he said. “Got plenty of it back at base, anyway. Look, I dunno what you’ve got against _humans_ or what the hell you are, but I hurt you, and now I’m gonna help you. You’re just gonna have to trust me.”

The girl stared up at him, clutching her arm close to herself. The blood stained her pale blue shirt. If she didn’t get some pressure on that wound, she was liable to pass out.

“There’s bandages and stuff under the boards,” she mumbled.

“Thank you,” he said with a soft huff. “Was that so hard?”

She looked like she was about to shoot him a glare, but her face turned into a mask of fright when he grabbed the flashlight started to move. She threw another frantic look at her hook and string. Daryl guessed he understood. If a grappling hook was his only means of transportation, he wouldn’t like it to be out of his reach, either. For now, he’d rather the sharp barb be kept as far away from her as possible.

Sinking to his knees, he pointed the flashlight into the hole in the floorboards he created.

“Name’s Daryl, by the way,” he said distractedly, poking around through the stash to find medical supplies. It felt weird to do something as normal as introduce himself when he had just found a tiny person, but… anything _normal_ was fine by him at the moment. “What’s yours?” he prompted.

He felt the tiny weight shift in his hand as she scooted along his palm to see what he was doing--the weirdest damn feeling he’d ever felt. 

“Beth,” she answered. “My name’s Beth.”


End file.
